Art project Route Couture is a collection of sculpture-like garments and accessories, which are made of the fur and leather from road kill animals. Road kills are collected at the same time when the shoulder of a road is cleaned from trash. The project contemplates the appreciation and value of life by advancing the carcass from a position of garbage to a respected form.

The origin and production methods of animal products are invisible in advertisement. Media doesn’t show animal as physical, living, breathing or sentient being. Alternatively the consumer will see qute characters, that happily surrender to become food for people or who give us milk joyfully mooing. Garments made out of carcasses comment our relationship to animals.

Artists of the project are Lari Lätti, Karoliina Paappa, Leena Pukki and Stina Riikonen. They have been working with the project since 2008. Stina Riikonen has also collaborated with fashion designer Satu Riikonen.

Into Publishing and Voima Publishing published in december 2017 group’s book called Route Couture. Book is edited by Leena Pukki and Karoliina Paappa.

Meeting, from the series Utopia, 2016. Left side of the wall. 16 x 2,90 m. Spray paint. Fest i Nova- Future Memory, Garikula, Akhalkalaki, Georgia

Nowadays visions of better future may easily seem naïve or impossible. Themes of inevitables, like ever growing inequality, the looming environmental crises or a future otherwise filled with suffering are repeated in both thought and discussions. Perhaps as a reaction to these images of crises there has emerged a significant trend of social or activist art. Though like activism, activist art often acquiesces only to comment on or represent the crises, or presents a dystopia.

In contrast, Utopia is a method that attempts to reshape the future. Is it possible to constructively affect society’s development by means of visual art imagery?

I claim that utopia is an important concept for building committed art, political art or other types of political activities. Art provides space for creating or expressing utopias. There are no alternatives before they are imagined. Utopian imagery can generate hope, which then encourage people to act.

I Wake Up to the Sound of Helicopter, 2014. Oil on roller blind, 120 x 195 cm

Painting named The Squirrel Wants to Destroy Train Tracks and paintings from the same series picture environmental activism. They show moments from protest camps, meetings or nighttime poster mountings and express different feelings connected to activism.

Paintings are not activistic art, but paintings about activism. They demonstrate moments that are sometimes left out from public narrative.

Anonymous animal figures assimilate to fairy tales or illustrations. It looks like the society that appreciates individuality has problems on accepting activities that are made anonymous and not for one’s self-interest. Operatives could be as well energetic squirrel who wants to block a railway or birds who are feeding activist protesting on a tree.

They Have Drunk the Coffee and Gone Into the Night, 2015. Oil on roller blind, 82 x 183 cm

The Greyer is a character dressed up in grey color. She wanders around the city painting colorful objects grey. The Greyer has a special interest in advertisements.

The Greyer doesn’t create visual stimulants but erases them. The Greyer doesn’t ask to consume or perform or highlight, only to exist. The Greyer is not going to compete over attention; she’s trying to stop the competition. The greyer is an anti-advertisement, but the Greyer is not entertainment.

The Greyer has understood. Let city be grey and nature colorful. The Greyer sizes the city. On the other hand the Greyer has understood everything wrong from art, life, pleasure, beauty and entertainment. Grey is all the colors together. Greying is an attempt to concentrate and to calm down. Greying is an attempt to become present in an own space, to occupy space to one-self and to others.

The aim to make visual art is often an urge to leave a mark, be visible or make a statement heard. Non-public things will disappear. Grey is so ordinary, so well-known, that it loses its possibility to publicity, even though it would be presented public. The Greyer is the shittiest brand in the world. The Greyer is the bleakest artwork.

Stockholm, 2017. Photo: Anna Knappe

Helsinki, 2015. Photo: Ana Fradique

Helsinki, 2015. Photo: Ana Fradique

Leena Pukki (b. 1984) is a visual artist who is interested in cultural hegemonies, humanity, relationship between human and other species, history, utopias, feelings, power relations and activism. Pukki’s techniques expand from large scale mural painting to media art and wearable artwork. She often works in a public space and in different artist groups or communities, also combining art to activism. She is member of Miracle Workers Collective, that will represent Finland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She is a founding member of artist group Route Couture and activist performance group Scandinavian Punks.

Pukki received MA from the Aalto University School of Art and Design in 2015 and BA from Lahti University of Applied Sciences Art Institute in 2007. She has also studied in Kunsthochschule Berlin- Weissensee in Germany and in PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro Brazil. Pukki lives and works in Helsinki but comes from Luumäki, southeast Finland.

Pukki is board member in MUU ry (Finnish interdisciplinary artist association), Cultural Cooperative Makasiini and Leftist Artists’ and Writers Association Kiila. She works for Makasiini Co-operative and as a coordinator-artist in Taideharrastus ihan lähellä- project in ARX, Hämeenlinna Culture Centre for Children and Youth.

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The personal crisis phases are shock, reaction, processing and re-orientation. Myself, I am now in the phase of disintegrating.

It is a phase where my body fluids come out through my eyes.

In July i get to know that you have found a new one. Non-passionate, flavorless, unimaginative new one.

Now it’s december and the sorrow will come to me every evening and morning. I will write songs to it, paint paintings and treat it like a unpredictable pet.

I was supposed to do something else. I thought i would make an artpiece about self-branding, but it has to wait now. It became problematic that i couldn’t get up from sofa, and my eyes were constantly so swollen that it was hard to see. So, I was eye-lame, but in the dim light of the studio i could barely watch the canvas.

It was better to fortify in the studio than to move outside, because you never knew, what will cause the disintegrating reaction or speed up it. Maybe reading a newspaper in the morning, sleeping, eating tangerine, seeing the roadsign or your instagram post, where there is a hand with black nailpolish.

It was also hard to avoid seeing happy couples. Those pairs walking with the dizzy smile on their lips, those who have just found each other and lovely woke up from somewhere, just to wander around the city the whole day and rub salt in to the wounds of the one who is already a black pile that is leaking body fluids. Those hand-in-hand bastards. Those selfish, insensitive cruel people, who, when not walking hand in hand are calling to each other and discussing about what to make for dinner.